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By Root 1691 0

reaction, Lincoln pressed forward. A few days after the meeting, he discussed colonization at length with Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas and accepted Pomeroy’s offer to organize black emigration parties to Central America. Previously, Pomeroy had opposed colonization—if anybody should be sent out of the country, he quipped, it was slaveholders, “a class whose absence shall be least felt.” Now, on August 26, 1862, Pomeroy issued a public address, “sanctioned by the President,” inviting 100 black families to accompany him to Chiriqui. Within a few days he had received more than enough applications. Indeed, Frederick Douglass wrote to Pomeroy that his two sons desired to be included, even though Douglass himself opposed the idea. On September 11, even as a pivotal military campaign in Maryland unfolded, Lincoln authorized Secretary Smith to sign an agreement with the Chiriqui company for the U.S. government to purchase land for the colonists and advance funds for the development of coal mines. The document envisioned the eventual dispatch of 10,000 emigrants. By October, Pomeroy claimed to have the names of more than 13,000 potential participants. Even if he exaggerated, it seems evident that some black Americans found the idea appealing. Most of the volunteers appear to have been northerners, not contrabands or newly emancipated slaves in the nation’s capital.50

Lincoln’s meeting with the black delegation and stepped-up promotion of colonization formed parts of an unusual sequence of events between his decision in July to shelve the emancipation edict and the issuance of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation two months later. During this period, the military situation showed little improvement and pressure for emancipation continued to mount. Even as Lincoln privately intimated that he was “pretty well cured of objections,” he made a series of widely reported statements that cast doubt on his willingness to issue such a proclamation. In retrospect, he appears to have been preparing the northern public for the coming announcement.

Throughout these two months, northern newspapers, Republican as well as Democratic, criticized the administration’s “want of decision and purpose.” Republican congressmen who returned home after adjournment found public opinion demanding “a vigorous prosecution of the war.” From Ohio, John Sherman wrote to his brother, General William T. Sherman, “You can form no conception of the change of opinion here as to the Negro Question…. I am prepared for one to meet the broad issue of universal emancipation.” Letters poured into the White House demanding action against slavery. “The rebellion cannot be crushed without a general emancipation of the slaves,” wrote Benjamin Bannan, an influential editor from Pennsylvania.51

The will of God now became a consideration in the debate, an odd situation for a man like Lincoln whose religious views were, to say the least, unorthodox. Northern ministers, including many who could hardly have been described as abolitionists before 1861, delivered sermons and dispatched petitions and delegations to the White House explaining the war as a divine chastisement for the sin of slavery and assuring Lincoln that God intended him to free the slaves. At one meeting with two representatives of “Chicago Christians of all denominations,” Lincoln gently ridiculed the idea that God’s purposes were self-evident. He pointed out that prelates on different sides of the question had been pressuring him, “equally certain that they represent the Divine will.” Confederates also believed that God was on their side. He wondered why God had revealed his wishes to the delegation but not to him, since he must make the decision, although he quickly added that he did not expect “a direct revelation.”

Lincoln then discussed the pros and cons of emancipation; he almost seemed to be arguing with himself. On the one hand, slavery was undoubtedly “the root of the rebellion.” Emancipation would “help us in Europe,” “help somewhat in the North,” and weaken the Confederacy. On the other hand,